News just in: the world won't be particularly different in 2016

This article was first published in the November 2015 issue of WIRED magazine. Be the first to read WIRED's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content by subscribing online.

This article was taken from the preview of The WIRED World in 2016. In November, WIRED publishes its fourth annual trends report, a standalone magazine in which our network of expert writers and influencers predicts what's coming next. Here's a small selection of what to expect.

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We have evolved to pay attention to things that move fast. We're good at noticing an attacking tiger, bad at noticing climate change. That's why we have "news" and don't have "unchanged". And that's why WIRED is packed with things moving fast. That's what makes it brilliant: all the change, acceleration and disruption.

But we'd be remiss if we didn't also point out that a key defining characteristic of 2016 will be that, for the most part, it'll be exactly the same as 2015. And very like 2014. And much the same as 2006. And, actually, not that different to 1996, 1986 and 1976. Get a bit further back and it'll get different, but it's important to consider this point: most things, certainly most big things, don't change very fast. It's just that we don't pay attention to them.

For instance, the world in 2016 will still depend on fossil fuels. Transport in our major cities won't move any faster than it did 100 years ago. The best way to save lives will still be to vaccinate people and get more of them clean water. The fashion business will still exist; so will movies, music and advertising. No one working in any of those industries will have any idea how to guarantee a hit. Sub-Saharan Africa will still lead the world in mobile finance, the US and the UK will still have lousy broadband and there will still be no reliable way to determine which way to insert a USB stick.

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Why spoil this prediction-fest with curmudgeonly talk of nothing changing? Because in order to understand a prediction you have to understand its context. The architect Eero Saarinen put it best: "Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context -- a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan." The same applies to change and to time. Just as so many apps only seem to make sense if you live in San Francisco -- and they fail because most of us don't -- similarly, so many prognostications are only useful if you recognise that they're just tiny blips in a larger picture.

In his 1999 book The Clock of the Long Now, Stewart Brand described his notion of pace layers - a useful way to think about change. Imagine a set of concentric circles, faster moving things on the outside, slower things at the centre. The surface layer represents fashion and trends, changing all the time. Then, as you move inwards, you get commerce, then slower again, infrastructure and governance, then more glacially, culture and right in the centre, the slow unmoving constant -- nature. To truly grok the predictions outlined in these pages you need to consider them in this full-stack of context, because that's the ground in which you'll plant your idea.

Think about Google's self-driving cars. They seem to have cracked the technology; those things are probably safer than a human driver, but now they have to deal with long, slow layers of governance and culture. How, for example, does society deal with the fact that real drivers break minor traffic laws all the time -- and that it's often necessary to keep traffic moving? Do we want robots doing that? How do we even decide? We don't have good ways for legislation to keep up with technology. That, I can confidently predict, won't change in 2016.

This article was first published in the November 2015 issue of WIRED magazine